-non-music-non-stop – the principle of superposition: Deleuze/Guattari with Laruelle and Laruelle with Deleuze/Guattari.
(according to the 4 musicologies of Jarrod Fowler)
The laruellian concept of superposition can give advice to two different treatments of sound thinking as non-representation (thinking of sound instead about sound). One illustrates an incommensurability of closure, hermetically seperated from other materials, paradigms and theories, the other illustrates an incommensurability of relation and exchange, which is porous enough to permit heterogeneous assemblages without imposing them (Terrence Blake). While the first concept includes representation as thinking about sound, the latter tends to confusion, as it tends to fuse thinking and sound. This con-fusion reflects the belief of experimental electronic music in its first period, which we call Musicology I, that everything in the world is musical, and furthermore this belief is more or less unrecognised associated with the Principle of Musical Sufficiency. The concept of superposition is aware of these problems and can use therefore the heuristics of as if, as if experimental music and its autonomous theoretical order would be identical with the background noise of the world itself, as if it wouldn`t be necessary to simulate the background noise, to compose in immanence the global soundcloud, like Michel Serres said, immanent to a abstract theory of the interpenetration of noise and rhythm.
What is noise? The conception of noise under the aspect of irreversibility is associated to a logic of radical contingency. On one side noise is observer relative, so it may be measured by systems according to their degree of randomness, their algorithmic functions, on the other side noise is observer independent, as radical contingency or hyperchaos noise exceeds human capacity of perception for capturing it as a phenomenal information. The definition of noise as failure or disturbance presupposes the position of an objectivized ideal in and of science, to exclude noise and the composition of noise, thus thinking the real always as a correlate of thought. Here we are already in the middle of the problematic of Musicology II, which situates music as a product of science, the methods of differential and numerical measure and the construction of order. Non-musicology starts on this plane as a different treatment between music and experimental science, breaking with the idea, that everything is musical and therefore developing a science of music, which does not become science itself. The infiltration of non-musicology into musicology II means the mutation of music using scientific methods to investigate pluralism and hybridisation in science. As Jarrod Fowler puts it: „Crucially, this non-science of music is not anti-music, but is a mutation of traditional beliefs and practices. Although Non-musicology is critical of musical doctrine, Non-musicology does not goal the absolute destruction of music, but strikes some unknown invention of music. The program of Non-musicology is to use musicology to construct alien theories without those theories being yielded by the Principle of Musical Sufficiency: “All is not musical, this is our news”.“ The disruption of Non-Musicology in this period intends not only to break with musical self-sufficiency, but articulates another break, that less conculdes a new immersion of the audience into the conditions of hearing, as Michel Serres says and maybe Deleuze would say too, but leads to the ecological anticause, the hearing-in-Rhythm, as Jarrod Fowler says, which is identical with rhythm, insofar rhythm is different from metrics and recurrence.
What is rhythm? First rhythm is a temporally extended pattern, which includes for information processing system several parameters, which Inigo Wilkins summarizes as spatial parameters (acceleration/speed), temporal parameters (microsonic, suprasonic/infinite time scales etc.), amplitude (inaudible quietness versus sonic warfare), frequency (ultrasonic versus infrasonic processes) and superposition (the in-between of individual perceptions and nonindividual percepts). If processing systems include observer relative reality of rhythm determined by the system’s umwelt, there is also an observer independent reality (Umgebung) of rhythm, where permutation and non-permutation exist independent of human perception. The distinction between umwelt and umgebung leads to the question, how technology, maths and science, make it possible to discover the existence of rhythms that are beyond human sensory perceptual capacities. Furthermore it has to be asked if there is a simple opposition between noise and rhythm, what we can answer with no, because rhythm is defined by the identifiable and unidentifiable processes of composition of rhythm, which allows for the incommensurable chaos to pass into an order, and the degree or quantity of non-linear and non-rhythmic noise. rhythm may exist at many degrees of dynamis (relation betwen movement and order) and magnitude, it may emerge from noise, whereby the simulation of noise with stochastic processes (rainfall – Xenakis) demonstrates, that the process of enfolding of rhythm and signals in its presupposition offers a large quantity of superposed hetereogenous movements occurring at different time scales, but still noise is of a larger dynamis and magnitude than rhythm. Noise is foreclosed to any ontological or epistemological theory. In the contextual area of noise and rhythm non-musicology destroys the musical desire-for-Rhythm, that subordinates Rhythm to metrics and recurrency. If rhythm is distinct from metrics, we touch the field of non-frequency politics, the politics of productive difference, which includes, that Rhythm is disrupted from metrics and science, therefore using science and music as pure material. In Musicology III non-musicians start to reduce discourses of philosophy and science to pure material by sampling in the last instance to achieve in interaction with hearing-in-rhythm pulse ‘rhythmights’, like Jarrod Fowler says, using an anticausal method of productive difference of the rhythm machines. rhythmight as a non-musicalogical term involves a dynamic and open aleatorism, because non-musicology’s complex axioms and hypothesis are insufficent, while the theoretical practice remains dependent on sample politics, which is oscillating between an actual pool of samples and the capacity to create new samples. Samples are nowadays part of the mediapool, regardless if they are saved on analog of digital media. Sampling includes the program controlled and machinic transformation of the musical material with special features, transposing, time stretching or cut up, even software can get sampled, because the medium doesnt distinct between programm data and data, which represent objects. Sampling is a technology for access and transformation of media material, by grasping the signals of the media of transmission, and besides sender and recipient it is a third way of transformation, which extracts and clons the signal inside the channel und makes it acessible fo new transformation. Sampling subverts the purposeful transfer from source to destination, which is part of the modell of shannon. Instead of an exact process of mapping the input onto the output sampling activates an production process, using the signal, which is subtracted from its functional and contextual environment. Musicology III leads from sampling to so called pulse ‘rhythmights’, produced with techniques through immanent and generic methods of percussive flights, being not in the world, but being in music, a music which remains radical immanent and incostistently samples-in-the-last-instance. Furthermore this still binds the methods of rhythmics to ecological hearing in rhythm.
With Deleuze or Boulez we can now speak of rhythm in terms of nonperiodic pulsed or clicked music. There is a transversal disjunction, which is articulated in the track intern and in relation to other tracks, and this achievs the transition of Clicks and Cuts. Transversality is originally a topological concept meaning an “extending over, lying across, intersecting […] without a resulting coincidence”, while transversal music caulks the cut between actual and virtual on the rise of the performance itself, by mutating from a device designed to connect the past with the present into a newly future-oriented one. If we listen to a track, we always hear other things, which Deleuze describes as forces, duration, sensation and lightness, depending how Tempi, Rhythm and Sound are variied. For heterogenous temporalities and spatial components, which overlap and coexist in a track, the click opens in its invincible evidence various potencials to move on, as the signal is short and without contextual reference, so no remindable association can be given. Only through the catenation of signs something like indetermination starts to get indicatory, whereby failure can get part of music, but failure is not a inscribed meaning in clicks and cuts, rather a referential, which indicates possibilities of previous and coming sign catenations. In the nameless in between meaning is constructed with the help of signs, which are not, what they pretend to be. Through the comment of other signs a momentum of meaning is produced, because a sign like the click realises differance, suspended presence, while rendering reference to the following signs. Failure as such doesn`t exist, who recognises them is always integrated in a specific context, which could be different. Similiar pulse can be understood as an inherent stress that falls on certain metrics or beats. In relation to listening the clocktime this would mean, that one might hear now “tick – tock” instead of “tick – tick,” because every other beat is more stressed than the beat before. This repeating stress is the pulse, and in music different sorts of pulses can be overlapped and constructed by grouping beats together in different milieus or patterns. And the technique of anti-human music forces to divide time into such nuanced patterns that only machines could perform them with perfect precision. This is quite close to Heinrich Kleists proposal, that for producing powerful rhythmight the puppet player has to become itself an automat, insofar as a machinist has to relocate himself into the emphasis of the machine, while empasis is here armed with an imaginary attraction, which correlates to the following: when non-frequency-politics is listening to the clock, it hears “tic – toc – fuck the clock” instead of “tik – tik” because it knows, that the beat or metrum has to be stressed. This is another hotspot on non-music according to Laruelle, who speaks about a dispersive apriori related to the foreclosed and indifferent real. And the reference to non-frequency-politics is here quite easy: the relation between the different speed of waves and the maxima of intensity or timeless degree of different waves constitutes the dispersion, which cannot be measured in an aleatoric manner. Exterior to the clockban non-frequency-politics is the supertrace, is the tracing of the immanent rhythmicity of Rhythm in the hearing-in-Rhythm, as Jarrod Fowler says, is flow an sich or the quantum, because the generators of non-frequency-politics are always oversweeping the beat of the significant “ding ding ding ding.” At this stage rhythm is still hearing in rhythm as radical ecology, while non-musicology knows, that the interaction between Rhythm and hearing is unilateral, hearing-in-rhythm cannot affect Rhythm, while Rhythm is foreclosed to hearing-in-rhythm. The interaction between Rhythm and hearing is unilateral, the relationship only goes one way. The unilaterality of rhythm, which is anticausal, doesn´t imply, that music can be reduced to Rhythm, but besides its territorial motives and melodic landscapes music is in-the-last-instance rhythm and heard from Rhythm. The exology of hearing hallucinates music as metrics, order, composition by ignoring the radical ecology of Rhythm, which is related to non-musics objectivity without representation, and at the same times the exology of hearing unconsciously supports, that the radical ecology of rhythm is corrupted by the convertibility of money, the processes in which the virtuality of value is actualised through infinite arrestor. At the end of Musicology III (non-) Musicology has to indicate a mutation of the radical ecology of Rhythm. In this context non-frequency-politics destroys the frequentiell implication of repetivness and stochastic ontology, but doesn`t care about absolut contingency (meillassoux), rather surpasses with laruelle the undulatorism of the quantum. What does that mean?
If Non-music or non-standard music is situated in the non-standard phase space between periodic sine tones or individual articulation of tones and non-periodic or non-individual complex transformation and modulation, there might be noted a theoretical neighbourhood to dantes bordum or the messiaen compositions techniques. The latter includes for example the listening of the individual rhythmic singing of each bird and the overall rhythm as an orchestra. On one side there is no total rhythmic disorder, which corresponds to the incommensurability of closure, as tones unrelated do not couple with one another; on the other side the birds are not synchronized to the ticking clock, as though a regular pulse would allow them all to share a common beat. The conclusion might be, that the metrum has to abonned to construct the autonomous and likewise heterogeneous beat, which is non-rhythm. Now it looks that non-frequency-politics would be nothing else as a re-invention of dantes “bordun”: but the ritornell of the bird as accompanied by the noise of the wood is not only a musical sensation, rather it forces rhythm via an interaction with hearing-in-rhythm ocean. Here we are now confronted with differences in the aesthetic conceptions of Deleuze/Guattari and Laruelle. The movement and the relation of sound molecules itself, their catenation happens for Deleuze/Guattari in the context of rhythmical territorialisation and de-territorialisation, which they describe as the ritornell, a kind of crystallisation of time-space, the temporalisation of space and the spatialization of time. Within the ritornell body, earth, rhythm and sound events are shortened with the intensity of the body without organs. Non musicology in this context could be subsequent to Laruelle understood as the production and tracking of Rhythmicity of rhythm in hearing-in-ryhthm, as an event of compression, which writes itself as an effect of the rhythm construction of the ritornell. And non-frequency politics would be the dance through the territorialised ritornell, which constituens is rhythm and its apparatus, the drum. Rhythmight is producing tension and solidification at the same time in hearing-in-rhythm, while getting aware, how to subtract the metrum. TIC-TOC- fuck the clock! means the principle, while endlessly mixing and remixing the conditions and relations of rhythmights and at the same time seperating rudiments from these mixtures, in order to use autonomous theoretical fragments indifferent from the musical structure. Laruelle renounces treating music like Deleuze/Guattari as the capture of affect and percept (relationship between material and forces), instead postulating in music an autonomous theoretical order – a non-scientific thought according to the radical immanence of the real, the real here understood as foreclosed and being-nothing, without mirroring something or being mirrored. Laruelle’s generalized fractality of thought is a radically unfolded plane of immanence without reflection of the transcendental, while destroying the empirico-transcendental doublet by its distanceless adequation. Non-musicology presents instead of a truth, which has its telos in the white silence of a full speaking, in which even the real should be countable, a incestuous con-junction of principle of superstitition (immanence of one-in-one) and non-commutativity. Where Deleuze/Guattari draws in „What is philosophy“ an distinction between scientific variables, artistic varieties and philosophical variations, Laruelle makes with his concept of non-philosophy all other concepts of philosophy and at least philosophy itself simple variables. This is not to produce reversibility between philosophy and science, neither between science and music; in musicology II non-musicology leads to practice music in a scientific stance to mutate music using scientific means related to the practice of science, as Jarrod Fowler says. The result of non-philosophy and non-musicology includes an generic matrix, which is apriori and transcendental at the same time, a generic matrix, whose idempotency functions are related to the real as determination-in-the-last-instance. Idempotency is a term of informatics, that refers to function thats remains unchanged by doubling and iterating itself or by the addition of new functions, so the generic matrix is related to non-commutative Identity which persists across variations and does not need any transendence. Deleuze/Guattari renounce representation, but still in the name of perception and affects, which are always correlated to experience. And this concept correlates to Musicology III, which we have discussed, where the non-musical construction of the rhythmight of music and science still is combined with hearing, hearing-in-rhythm, with musicological systems of listening. Musicology IV would now assert a further step, where non-musicology reduces philosophy, science and musical objects to pure material, by starting to sample the material from within non-musical discourses such as science and philosophy. By cutting off the principle of musical sufficiency, the immersive properties of sound in relation to perception and affect are also cut off. Instead non-music is producing an irreflective and automatic processing of variables by variables, which is a fractal proliferation of models without transcendence. Audio, as the material of media pools, is not related anymore „to a transindividually constituted prosthetic extension with reversible intentionality“, as Inigo Wilkins says. In his last works Laruelle speaks of the non standard method as a kind of immanent fiction, which includes invention, construction, performance and so on as a non-representative and non-expressive method, which uses only abstract and pure thought, like Laruelle says, for non-asthetics, which doesn`t need to appeal to the parallelism of philopsophy and art. This demands neither thinking of sound as sonic philosophy nor thinking about sound, but an abstract theory of sound, an radical abstract theory, which is absolutely non wordly and non–perceptual, as Laruelle says. Music is not orientated to a world, nor is it perceptional, rather it focuses on the immanent character of music as such, being in music, music is radical objectivation without representation or intentionality. This semblance of music can be no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation or a representation of world or of language, of affect or whatever, rather there exists a non-world of music, also for the musician or the philosopher of music, but this non-world still exists in present and is real, while non-music is always rooted in matter.
Back to non-frequency politics. It countermands the inscription of the differenziant value, which is the prevalence of money in all his registers, is semiotic value and the beat of the significant, which counts instead of the tic-toc of the pulsating difference the metrum as price. Punctuated production time of the code is in capitalism permanently inscribed in the body of music. At this point, one may mention that there must be a clandestine relation between non frequency politics and high frequency trading. High Frequency Trading can be understood as complex technical systems in capitalist finance, that generate the production of noise and at the same time reduce the information gradients, operating at a high rate of data streams and coding noise. With High Frequency trading financial systems try to regulate the randomness of assets in always finer scales of time, to anticipate the fluctuations of price politics. Complexity is here the random effect of acceleration towards maximum volatility, which can lead to an intentional production of noise, for irritating traders and the financial machines. But in relation to music we prefer not to speak first of all about absolut contingency, like we might could do with Meillassoux, instead we follow what distincts electronic music from High Frequency Trading, while former in its decomposition in the form of non-music exceeds even the Undulatorism of the Quants; and the accelerations, which are necessary, it can be also slowness, for decoding scripture and codes, should not lead to the hyperreal of Baudrillard, which introduces the universel traumata of capitals noir realism, instead binding acceleration in different modes as a kind of non-dialectical negativism. But not only try tracing of the rhythmicity of Rhythm in hearing-in-Rhythm, and thus through Sampling-in-the-last-instance, rather non-musicology in Musicology 4 starts to sample material from science and philosophy, from musicial material itself, to construct the immanent generic matrix, which is no longer overdetermined by the capitalist relations of production and circulation, rather a kind of objectivity without representation, an „objectivity, so radical that it is perhaps no longer an alienation, so horizontal, that it looses all intentionality, this thought so blind that it sees perfectly clearly in itself; this semblance so extended that is no longer an imitation, a tracing, an emanation, a representation of what is photographed.“ this includes the refusal of the world, even the refusal to create alternative worlds, but demands the real as parallel to the world.

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